by David Keenan
Oh my god, Wonder Woman says to him, you mean he ejects out the plane, oh my god, you are unbelievable. Tommy’s sitting there, beaming. How the fuck does he do it? Breaking the ice by being a complete fucking eejit. So are youse up for it, boys? Millington’s man says to us. He raises a can of Export in a cheers. Aye, we’re up for it, Tommy says to him. Sure, we’re up for anything, he says. Wonder Woman has her arm around him by this point. I’m looking round at fucking Red Rum to my right here, this fucking mouthful of teeth and breath on her like you would not believe. Let’s get a sing-song going, she says. Then Millington’s man starts with it. He starts to the singing of it.
Do you want a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?
That’s what he sings.
It was the first time I had ever heard it.
Prisoners had started refusing food in the Crumlin jail. But this is before the whole hunger strike kicked off. And they’re singing this song.
Do you want a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?
Do you want a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?
Do you want a chicken supper, you dirty Fenian fucker?
Do you want a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?
Then fucking Tommy joins in. I’m staring over at him but he won’t catch my eye and he’s singing it along with the rest of them.
Do you want a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?
I fucking join in myself. What the fuck else was I going to do? And now we’re all singing this song, this song from out the future, which is where I’m talking from now, only this is back then, and Millington’s man starts making up new words on the spot, calling him Robert Sands and taking the pish.
Would you prefer a chicken doner, Robert Sands?
Or what about a black pudding supper, Robert Sands?
What about a black pudding supper, you dirty Fenian fucker?
What about a black pudding supper, Robert Sands?
Singing it in this fake posh English accent. It’s fucking horrible. But we’re acting like it’s the funniest thing in the world. Then Millington’s man announces it. Alright, he says, so youse are up for it? We’re up for it alright, Tommy says. Up for anything. But then I says to him, up for what exactly? I says. The orgy, he says to me. And Millington comes over and stands right in front of me and without a word she lifts her dress up and she’s not wearing any panties and she’s shaved her pussy, fuck me but she has only shaved her fucking pussy, I’ve never seen a fucking shaved pussy in my life, you were lucky to get a fucking clean pussy in Belfast, never mind one with all the hair trimmed, and without a thought I just fucking unzip my trousers and pull her down on top of me and fucking stick her right there. Lucky for me, because then her man fires into Horse-Breath and I see Tommy and Wonder Woman going at it on the couch.
Now she’s on top of me and she’s making all these noises, mewing like a cat is unbelievable, and I fucking tear her dress down and she says to bite her tits and I shoot my load in two minute flat, what do you expect from an uneducated Irishman, but then she gets down on her knees and starts blowing me and now I’m ready to go all over again. I’m looking over her shoulder at Tommy. I can see Wonder Woman beneath him. I can see her legs either side of him, he’s got his trousers pulled down, I can see his arse pumping away. And Wonder Woman’s legs are shaking, her whole body is starting to shake. She pushes her legs out, she’s still wearing her heels, and she pushes her legs against the wall to steady herself. Stop it, stop it, you’re making me dizzy, she says to him, but Tommy doesn’t stop it. Then Horse-Breath turns to me and starts kissing me full-on: disgusting. I push her down and tear open my shirt so she can tongue my nips while I’m fucking Millington from behind. Millington’s man goes over to Wonder Woman. He looks at Tommy for a second. She can suck my dick while you fuck her, he says to him. Tommy nods. So as she starts sucking his dick while Tommy’s pumping her. Me and Millington are all done by this point, I’m over, just crashed out on the couch, watching them. Tommy’s on his back and Wonder Woman gets on top. Millington’s man gets up behind her and tries to slip it into her arse at the same time. That’s when Tommy loses it.
You fucking touched my dick with your dick, you fucking poof, he says to him. He flips Wonder Woman off him in one movement. You fucking dirty poofter, Tommy says to him, and he’s struggling to get his trousers up. Calm down, mate, Millington’s man says to him, it was just a fucking accident, I must’ve brushed your cock by mistake. But it’s too late for that now. Tommy has flipped. You’re a raging fucking arse bandit, Tommy’s screaming at him, and he’s rubbing his cock with his hand like he’s caught something. Then he half-marches/half-staggers across the room, with his trousers pulled to just above his knees, tears this lamp out its socket with one hand and sets about him. Millington’s man falls back onto the couch and Tommy’s kneeling over him, smashing him in the fucking head with this fucking heavy marble lamp. At one point I see what looks like a bit of skull go flying up into the air. Leave him, the women are screaming, you’ll fucking kill him! I leap to my feet and I pull him off. What the fuck are you doing, you fucking nutcase? But by this point he’s like a sleepwalker. You cannot wake this guy from the trance. So as I drag him to the floor and I hold him down but then I start worrying that our fucking dicks are going to accidentally collide or something so as I push him away and I yell to him to get our fucking bags, I’m screaming at him, grab our fucking bags, I says, and I push him out the door. Then I stand there, guarding it, with this fucking broke lamp in my hand. Nobody leaves, I says to them. The guy is lying there in a pool of blood. Oh, my baby, my baby, Millington’s saying to him, and she’s lifting his head and she’s trying to talk to him, he’s trying to mouth words back at her, and now he’s puking blood all over himself and Wonder Woman and Red Rum are lying there with their make-up smeared and their clothes torn and their panties all twisted on their legs and their nylons. Tommy’s at the front door. I hear him tearing the phone out the wall. Let’s go, he shouts. I look round at the carnage, at the women whimpering, at the guy whose head is pulped, at the hotel lounge that we’ve completely destroyed. What we did on our holidays, I says to myself, and by five o’clock the next day we’re in London, in a pub in Kentish Town, drinking green with a bad bastard name of The Swan.
*
The Swan takes us back to his, you should have seen the state of this place. Tommy’s da called ahead and arranged everything, we were bedding down with two blokes from Liverpool in the back room of this squat in Queen’s Crescent, four mattress on the floor and bottles lying everywhere and no shower. You can use the YMCA for that, one of the guys says to us, this obvious homo called Rick. No danger. We spend most of our evenings in a pool hall on the Holmes Road name of Paradise, playing for money. What paradise is this we dreamt ourselves into, I says to Tommy, what kind of garden is this, I says to him that night.
*
Swans mate for life, do you realise that, son? That’s how The Swan gets his name. The eyes of a swan are inscrutable, this is what this cunt I’m playing pool with says to me. Inscrutable. Cunt name of Blackie, must have been six foot two. The eyes of a swan, he says to me, are as black as hell’s gates. The Swan’s partner was killed in action, that’s all he says to me, none of the specifics. But he has been faithful ever since, he says.
By this point The Swan is half-blocked and has his arm around Tommy and is singing in his ear. I catch a line of it, an old Irish folk song about a widowed swan looking back across its life and recalling the still, faraway lochs that it had sailed over with its long-lost partner, the great flowing rivers that were a part of them and that had delivered them to the future, the green Irish fields, down there, beneath the two of them.
Are there swans in Belfast? Blackie says to me.
And everything feels like it is in code:
being a swan,
a swan in Belfast.
The Swan is on his feet now. I dreamt I was a swan, he’s singing, floating on the tide (his long-ago partner and himself) past long-abandoned mansions (l
ike up on the Malone Road) all overgrown with trees (and misty-wet with rain) and with thick vines hanging down, and there is another sort of bird living in this song, a bird that moves to greet the swans (all in this song where they have been expected for such a long time), and they are led along a path (in the shadow of tall fir trees) and isn’t it a pity, isn’t it a shame, of course it’s tragic, of course it is strange, because we’re swans, he sings, to the whole room now, and what do swans need with a mansion, with a house with a butler and a maid, and the swans are led into a library, a library all piled high with books, and the swans look around, and on every shelf they see, there is everything they could have dreamt of reading, stories of all their friends as they were growing up, the memories of their parents, as little birds themselves
– birds themselves, birds themselves, he descended down the scale –
poems by their brothers and sisters (bird poems) (poems by younkers), accounts of the uprising of grandfathers, the rising up of old swans, and the things that happened in the moment of them
– the moment of them, the moment of them, he shakes his head as he declaims –
and the swans, this pair, they turn to each other, these beautiful black-eyed birds, and it’s like a joke to them, a terrible sad joke, that they were born swans, and had no way of making sense of any of it. For swans cannot read, I says to my lover, and this is The Swan singing now. And my lover looks back at me, with those eyes of his, those eyes of his, as he sings, and my lover, he asks me, whether one day, when he passes, maybe he could be turned into a book. But I won’t be able to read it, my lover, my long-lost, I won’t be able to read you, my dear, is how sings, The Swan, in return.
*
Back in the flat in Kentish Town, Tommy’s chest rising and falling, and the side of his face, in the light of cigarettes, next to me, on the floor, in the dark, I’m imagining us landing on water, together, and how it is soft between our legs, 1977, and how we sail off, silent, and without a thought.
*
In a cafe in Camden Town, The Swan tells me he how he knew my da. I knew your da, he says to me. Then he just lets it sit there. He looks at me like I’m the one that’s supposed to ask him a question. But I don’t know what to ask about my da. He was some man, The Swan says to me eventually. Aye, I says to him, he was some man.
I’m for the full English, Tommy says. He’s sitting on the other side of the table, next to Blackie, drinking coffee. There are stains on his white shirt; we’ve been hiding out too long. You realise that The Full English is a euphemism? Blackie says to him. The fuck’s a euphonism? Tommy says to him.
Euphonism is Greek for lovely-sounding words, Blackie says to him. Euphemism, on the other hand, is a word for another word. Why use one word for another if you’ve already got a word for it already? Tommy says to him. Because it’s funnier, Blackie says to him, and he looks across the table and he says to us, are you sure this guy is a fucking Irishman? The Full English, Blackie says to him, means taking it up the arse. I’m talking about getting raped, by the screws, in the jail, he says.
They don’t do that, do they? I says, and I turns to The Swan. They don’t rape prisoners, do they? He looks over at Blackie and then back to me. Over mirrors, The Swan says to us. They rape them over mirrors. Christ on a stick – what?! You’ve never lived, The Swan says to me, and he winks. You know nothing about pain. Then he says to me, pass me that fucking steak knife there, would you, and he takes this big fucking steak knife and he raises it up in the air and he plunges it straight into his fucking arm.
We’re both pushing back from the table. Tommy lets out a shout. What the fuck. But Blackie is just sitting there, looking at The Swan, who has this knife sunk up to the hilt in his forearm, and The Swan isn’t even reacting, he’s just staring at me and Tommy with a look of sadness and contempt and he says to us, you fucking stupid arseholes, he says, you fucking useless bastards, he says to us, and he shakes his head and he starts laughing, and then Blackie’s off, and Blackie’s laughing too, and the owner of the cafe comes over and he says to The Swan, what the fuck have I told you about ruining my cutlery, and now the owner’s laughing as well, and The Swan takes hold of the knife and draws it, slowly, out of his arm, staring at the two of us the whole time, and he hands the knife back to the owner, it’s bent, with the fucking force it is bent that he stuck it into himself, and he holds out his hand to the owner and it is Christ displaying his wounds which are like beautiful delicate labias who grabs him by the wrist and pulls his entire fucking arm off. The Swan has a prosthetic limb. The owner holds it up for us to see. It’s punctured and cut and discoloured at the end. It’s missing a finger. You think you know about pain, The Swan says to us, you think you are capable of suffering, he says, but do you think they make plastic fucking hearts? Fuck this, Tommy says, I’m sticking with a bacon roll.
*
Did you ever hear of lagging? Lagging. It’s a musical thing. Rebel Songs, is what The Swan says to us. Tonight, my friends, we’re going to get us some right old Rebel Songs, he says, and he tells us about the basement of this pub run by The Boys (God’s Boys, he calls them, and he winks at us), where they play this new style of song, this new style of music that came out of The Maze and Her Majesty’s pleasure, and that was sung into bowls, into drainpipes and toilets and along echoing corridors, late at night, this music of longing and of sad sufferation, The Swan says to us, this music of fading and of lagging, he says, sure you’ll love it, he says to Tommy, did you never hear the Irish psalm-singing, he says to him, but Tommy says that he just cannot imagine singing Como down a toilet bowl.
The pub is on the Prince of Wales Road, it has changed its name, but back then it was called The Butcher’s Hook. We head down the stair, into the basement, and the place is filthy and smells of pish. There are thick black curtains hanging down, blocking off certain areas. This is the fucking orgy scene forever, I says to Tommy. Only there are no birds, Tommy says to me. I hadn’t noticed that before, but it was all men (it was fucking ominous) and at the end of the room there’s a DJ set up, a dark-skinned guy with the dreadlocks name of John The Gun.
Fuck me, Tommy says, it’s Bob Dylan. The master of ceremonies, is how The Swan introduced him. Sure, how did you get your name, Tommy says to him, and John The Gun’s face is all covered in sweat, and the sweat is glistening on his dark skin, and the bright white of his eyes, and he says to Tommy, my weapon, that’s all he says, and Tommy is just stood there, like that, as the music kicks in, and John The Gun starts with these sounds, like the crackle on an old Como record, coming out of the past, he has an old tape recorder that he is playing Rebel Songs on and making them repeat in strange rhythms and next to him there’s an old guy in a bunnet playing the accordion and the first man up is an old Irishman with a circular scar around his head, all covered in rashes and wearing an old brown suit, he takes the mic and starts to sing, there are thirty or forty men in the room, all stood right in front of the stage, the Irish diaspora, they call them, boys as down on their luck as any of us, with their battered hats and their stained suits and their echoing, lamenting music, and now he is singing of place names, and it is like seeing Bethlehem written in letters on a road sign in the Holy Land, it is such a strange sensation, Bally-me-na come in, he sings, just like they did in the cells, into the toilet bowls, to tell The Boys where they had come from, to sing where they had been removed from and where they returned to, still, in dreams, there are tears and there are cries and there are soft lamentations, from Inniskeen till Kildare come in, and the places are echoing, forever, till Derry come in, from Eskra till Finglas come in, we dreamt of the places, and sang of their names, in our own time, overlapping with each other, till Galway come in, till Waterford, till Athlone, till Dublin, till Drogheda and Cavan come in, till Enniskillen come in, till Carrickfergus, till Coleraine and Letterkenny come in, is a cloud of voices, and in their lagging is a song, in London, as it was in the H Blocks, as it will be in heaven, on the arrival of The Boys, in the pla
ce of names, which is the place of endless echoes, The Calamity is what they call it, not The Troubles, Calamity come down, they says, as John The Gun starts to dance on the spot, clacking his shoes like in a tappety dance and waving his arms up into the air, and the men in the front have their arms round each other and the Irishman with the scar is singing of place names of Ireland and Ireland is in Bible time and the sound it is risen, in all of us, and here comes the sound
(fornighsanfornighsanfornighs(openseyes)fornighsanfornighsanforevers)
and I catch a look at Tommy, and he smiles over at me, and I can see that his eyes are damp, and I slide my arm around his shoulders, at this sad sound of others, out of time but beautiful with each other, and now everybody has joined in, a sound like soft thunder, and the tape is playing the words back as an echoes, as a lingo that has fallen, as words that have upped and fucking died, in Bible time, forever, so no need of books, or storyfications, or words, for that, or for no memories, neither.